He didn't know why he'd kept the letters.

The floor of his new house was still slightly dusty, but at least now it was all clean. Gale had spent the past three hours ridding the main floor of anything that didn't belong there (most notably the body of the fallen hunter that he had found while clearing out the last traces of the phoenix), and then the next hour rearranging the (very minimal) amount of furniture.

There wasn't much. On the first floor, a small, neatly kept couch that really needed a few stitches here and there to make it look a little more presentable; a faded armchair, and in the kitchen, a slightly battered, square table and matching set of four chairs. Upstairs, in the spare bedroom there was a twin-sized bed and brown wood dresser; and in the master bedroom, a slightly larger bed, perhaps a queen size (it almost looked like some weird size between full and queen), a dresser identical to the one in the other bedroom (except with more nicks in the wood), a tiny walk-in closet that anyone taller than about six foot would have to stoop to get into, and a little, glass-topped bedside table that was, miraculously, unbroken. Gale wasn't certain how that, of all things, had managed to stay in the condition it was, especially considering what had been rampaging throughout Deus for the past several weeks - but he wasn't complaining. Considering the overall lack of furniture in the house in general, he was lucky enough to have somewhere to sleep, let alone set things on top of.

Besides cleaning out the main floor, Gale had taken the next several hours wiping down, Windex-ing, washing, cleaning, soaping, rinsing, dusting, sweeping, mopping - and, in some cases, swearing at - everything and everything in the house. He worked ceaselessly from the bottom of the house up to the top, until he was certain that he had managed to get every little thing out from every little corner. It wasn't so much that he minded a little spider here and there, but something about living in his own place - in his own place, no one else's - made him want to keep it as nice as possible. Perhaps it was because this place was not the same as living in the dorms, surrounded on all sides by voices, by laughter, by crying, by music and by noise and messes of all kinds. It was not the same as living in a house that he had always alone in, but that had never belonged to him, no matter how many times he had tried and pretended that it was.

This was his and his alone.

Gale did not have very many possessions, even before the damage that the phoenix had done. He had never been one to collect extraneous things, or harbor a secret fascination for one fad or another (what was the point of stamp collecting, anyway, if you were never going to use them?). His uncle had always called him a minimalist - Leslie had been the one to hoard things that she found special, or things that she wanted to remember.

Leslie, who he would never see again. A part of him had always known that she would never wake up, but another part of him had never wanted to admit that. Leslie, his twin, his other half, the girl he had grown up with, with whom he had shared a part of his soul. Being siblings was one thing - being twins was an entirely different story; a story with an ending that would never be finished properly. A part of him had died with Leslie; an irreparable cut, deep into the membranes of his heart and his mind, a void that would never be filled. Perhaps that was why he was the way he was; too serious, as Bix and Marcus had both told him on separate occasions. Too "mature" for his age, too focused on what he was doing. Neither childish enough, nor adult enough. Trapped in that cage of repeated mistakes, repeated blunders, repeated stupidity.

No, Gale did not usually keep little trinkets or momentos; at least not in the way that his sister had. But it seemed as though, over the past year and a half that he'd been at Deus Ex Machina, his defenses were wearing thin. He'd relaxed a little, softened the hard edges of his personality. A small collection of his own had started to accumulate, and it was these things that Gale had searched for after the destruction of the dorms. Searched, and found a few here and there. He had not managed to retrieve all of his possessions - his room was not entirely destroyed, but there were definite problems with it, rubble and chunks of wall and ceiling strewn across the floor. The bed had still been intact, the dresser destroyed, but at least the tiny box with its little collection of precious things, was safe and sound.

Now, as Gale sat on his bed up in the master bedroom of his new home, he held it in his hands, running his thumb along the wood of the lid. It was late - a little before nine at night, and outside the sky was a dark, inky blue-black color, dotted with bright sparks of silver and white here and there. Quietly he pulled open the lid of the box.

The first thing that caught his eye were the letters, of course; he had stuffed them into the box on a day when he had been in a hurry, and he had not meant to take them with him - and yet he had. They were yellowed, the paper rough, and bound with a decrepit black ribbon that was so fragile that the ends had crumbled when Gale had pulled on it. The names on the papers within the envelopes were names he had read dozens of times before, but he still looked at them as though they were new.

He set them aside for now, gingerly, resting on the end of the bed. Drawing one leg up beneath him, Gale pulled out the next thing in the box - a silver faced watch with a thick black band and a square shape. Expensive and fancy, he had never really known whether or not he would wear something so...extravagant...but now, Gale pulled it from its wrappings six months late and slipped it onto his left wrist. He lifted his arm, examining it, and then - apparently satisfied with how it looked - turned his attention back to the next item. Beneath the first watch was a second, vastly different. This one was entirely silver, round and held at the end of a silver chain. He lifted it slowly from the box, dangling it in front of his face, his expression softening. The first watch, given to him by Davey for last Christmas, felt secure on his wrist - but this one...this one was special. Gale's fingers slipped over the front, clicking it open to reveal the face of the pocket watch, reflecting his own pale face in the glass.

Eva still owed him a battle.

Gale closed the lid of the box, but he still held the pocket watch in his hands, and the letters were still on the end of his bed. He stood up, and carrying the box with him, moved around to the other side of the room, sliding the little wooden box onto the glass top of the bedside table. Standing there for a moment, his fingertips lingering, he glanced around the quiet, small room, the weight of the pocket watch warm and familiar in the palm of his hand.

Pulling back the covers, Gale slid beneath them, and drew them up to his chest. He reached for the letters, set the pocket watch on top of the box and sighed. Then he leaned back against his pillows, pulled the first of the letters free from the ribbon, slipped it from its envelope, and began to read.